Angry Drunk Bureaucrat:UPMC is the biggest employer in the region, is one of the largest landowners, and is largely tax exempt. They threatened to cut off service to all Blue Cross customers if BC/BS bought one of the local smaller hospital systems.

They're kinda dicks.

Since non-medical employees began seeking unionization earlier this year from SEIU, they have been telling the public about the low wages paid by the healthcare giant and how it affects their ability to make ends meet.

Guess we know why their workers are trying to unionize then.

/but don't worry, unions are evil and government regulations will protect us.

cuzsis:Angry Drunk Bureaucrat: UPMC is the biggest employer in the region, is one of the largest landowners, and is largely tax exempt. They threatened to cut off service to all Blue Cross customers if BC/BS bought one of the local smaller hospital systems.

They're kinda dicks.

Since non-medical employees began seeking unionization earlier this year from SEIU, they have been telling the public about the low wages paid by the healthcare giant and how it affects their ability to make ends meet.

I go down to Speaker's Corner I'm thunderstruckThey got free speech, tourists, police in trucksTwo men say they're Jesus one of them must be wrongThere's a protest singer singing a protest song - he says'they want to have a war to keep us on our knees

They want to have a war to keep their factoriesThey want to have a war to stop us buying JapaneseThey want to have a war to stop Industrial DiseaseThey're pointing out the enemy to keep you deaf and blindThey want to sap your energy incarcerate your mindThey give you Rule Brittania, gassy beer, page three

Two weeks in Espana and Sunday striptease'Meanwhile the first Jesus says 'I'd cure it soonAbolish Monday mornings and Friday afternoons'The other one's on a hunger strike he's dying by degreesHow come Jesus gets Industrial Disease?!

Silly Jesus:positive p: jaylectricity: Silly Jesus: I own a company, and I sell widgets. I get $11 for each widget that I sell. I pay Bob $10 for each widget that he makes, but his family is hungry. What is your solution for the evil business owner?

Silly Jesus:

2. Even if the company isn't hurting (which is the case for some of them, for some of them it isn't), show me where any company is obligated to pay anyone some arbitrary amount which will make their employee "comfortable."

Ah I think we're finally making progress. Here you've clearly equivocated. You think that not being hungry is a 'comfort' instead of a basic function of human dignity in a society that can easily afford to eradicate this problem as if it were polio.

This is the lack of moral leadership people keep complaining about.

Businesses are not charities.

Well they shouldn't farking rely on charities to cover their employees because the CEO needs 5.7 Mil. (from a link upthread).

Silly Jesus:I own a company, and I sell widgets. I get $11 for each widget that I sell. I pay Bob $10 for each widget that he makes, but his family is hungry. What is your solution for the evil business owner?

Well, if you're a typical CEO in the United States, you pay yourself $2,000 for every $10 that you pay Bob, write off your losses against corporate taxes, then when the debt piles up you fire Bob before awarding yourself a $20 million bonus for a job well done or, in the worst of cases, pay yourself a $100 million golden parachute before leaving the company in someone else's hands.

According to Republicans, this is called being a successful job creator and deserving of tax cuts.

Because he doesn't have the supply chain, sales force, manufacturing capabilities, advertising, or patents that the company has??

Cuz THAT'S covered by the 9% left after 91% employee compensation per unit, uh huh. Nope, money laundering is still the most likely candidate for this scenario. here's how it goes down...

Lilly Cheesus fronts a "manufacturing shop" in Bumfark, and he has contracts for widgets from Boliver Morth, who works for the Fed. Boliver pays Billy Wheesus in direct cash payments(wired) and invoices 200,000 widgets a month for $11/ea. But Milly Beesus only produces 200 widgets, which are round, hollow containers you see, that he actually buys at Family Dollar, and he contracts with farking BOB to make them and farking BOB is a double digit IQ Teaderper that thinks being on a 1099 is the cats pajamjams and he pays farking BOB by the peice, and farking BOB is all like SCHWEET MAH NIGG CASH MONAY becuase he gets $2000/mo for painting these units brown or something while working 20hr/week and that's not sufficient for his brood of 4 sticky children and a wife that never wears anything but pajama bottoms and underwear halter tops with her Uggs, so there's some unresolved tension there but Filly Leesus keeps telling farking BOB that orders are gonna be up next month or some stupid shiat which farking BOB totally believes and fronts him some cash or lunch and shiat, and Gilly Meesus records his costs on book at 10:1 thanks to farking BOB'S paychecks we he records as operating expenses because farking BOB is on that 1099 yall and then fudges his deliverables by 3 decimal places to the right.

Dilly Peesus pays himself $8K/mo which IS farkING BALLIN' YO and puts a cardboard case of 200 units on a long haul service on the 23rd of every month and gets the bill of lading which somehow matches up with his fudgy receivable and HE STAPLES THEM TOGETHER YO AND MAILS THEM TO... Boliver Morth, who submits them in triplicate to his accounting team. It's a flawless scheme.

Insatiable Jesus:Either decide that you want to live as a serf under some corporate feudal system or if you want to take your country, and your world back.

Make no mistake, the enemy of America are the wealthy and the corporatists. They launched a coup on this country. Remember oil going out of sight for no readily apparent reason? Yeah, that was them sucking all the the money possible out of the bottom of the system. The Wall Street crash? That was money being sucked out of the top of the system. They systematically looted our wealth from bottom to top and blamed it on speculators and black people buying homes, respectively.

Now they sit on their wealth while the nation that played host to so many of them bleeds and suffers. And these insufferable pricks use that misery to hold this nation hostage and demand the dismantling of decades worth of hard fought labor law and lower taxes for themselves.

Power has never simply quit the field. Never in history has power just stepped aside or stopped seeking MORE power. It has to be driven off with blades and bullets. Power only understands power. These people have no intention of stopping until they have as much power and control over our lives as possible. The see this nation as something for them to rightfully plunder, citing the fact that people like themselves built this country and created this economy. Never mind that if any of the wealthy families of today never existed, somebody else would have done those same things. But they believe themselves to be special, above us.

They need to be shown that they are not special. That they bleed and suffer and burn like those that they tread upon so callously.

Musket Balls.

Faces.

It's time to take out the Tories, again.

There was a time when suggesting this would have been reactionary and stupid. Not anymore.

It ended up with a lot of noble heads in baskets and some guy named Napoleon running most of Europe, IIRC.

Hey Napoleon was really the high point of that whole affair, Really it's the same as it ever was we still have religious crazies waiting to take control, rich getting richer at the expenses of their laborers.

Silly Jesus:I own a company, and I sell widgets. I get $11 for each widget that I sell. I pay Bob $10 for each widget that he makes, but his family is hungry. What is your solution for the evil business owner?

I can arrange to have those widgets made for $6 each, including the shipping from Bangalore.

Giblet:Silly Jesus: I own a company, and I sell widgets. I get $11 for each widget that I sell. I pay Bob $10 for each widget that he makes, but his family is hungry. What is your solution for the evil business owner?

I can arrange to have those widgets made for $6 each, including the shipping from Bangalore.

Abacus9:Giblet: Silly Jesus: I own a company, and I sell widgets. I get $11 for each widget that I sell. I pay Bob $10 for each widget that he makes, but his family is hungry. What is your solution for the evil business owner?

I can arrange to have those widgets made for $6 each, including the shipping from Bangalore.

Bob can get a job somewhere else.

Yeah, cuz everyone is hiring right now, right?

Bob had a job making $10 a widget: more than 95% of all people make. He was dissatisfied. His employer was dissatisfied. So the job was sent overseas.

Bob will work it out, or else his genes won't cloud our lovely pool.

Struggle against the logic all you like, but you will either adapt to it or starve.

Silly Jesus:jaylectricity: Silly Jesus: You should pay me more than I'm worth!

No wage slave has ever been paid even half of what he's worth.

I don't mean your unicorn fru-fru fantasy idea of what his soul is worth...I mean his worth to the company.

If you're making the company a $10 profit per hour of your labor, your labor isn't worth $15 an hour, no matter how hungry your family is.

All you have to do is look at the increasing disparity in the distribution of wealth between worker and owners/investors to know that a lot of people are not getting paid "what they are worth". There are a lot of ways for individual workers to be taken advantage of and your idea that everyone is getting paid exactly what they are "worth" is frankly not true. If an employee is generating $100 of profit per hour are they worth more than $10/hour? Or will that employer be tempted to pocket the $90 instead of $80 to put out a quarterly report that shows an extra 0.2cents/share growth?

The evidence is there that wages and the labor market have been taking the hit to further profits. Does this look like people getting paid what they are worth?http://dailybail.com/home/chart-us-corporate-profits-vs-employee-wage s .html

But yeah, go blame the employer. Unionize. Strike. Who knows? Maybe that company won't relocate and leave 20,000 people fighting for 4 MacDonald's jobs.

If they relocate who is going to buy all the products they are making? American citizens continue to represent the largest purchasers of consumer goods on the planet. In any case you can only exploit less developed nations for so long, until you develop their economies to the point where you are right back to the same labor and regulatory costs you face in a developed nation like the US.

In the long run we are going to have to figure out how to more tightly manage our economy. There are a lot of distruptive technologies on the horizon and robots don't buy cars or clothes, there will be the effects of global warming on food production, and of course are ever expanding population. There are major societal changes on the horizon, both at home and abroad. The world is going to be a very different place in 50 years time.

Giblet:Abacus9: Giblet: Silly Jesus: I own a company, and I sell widgets. I get $11 for each widget that I sell. I pay Bob $10 for each widget that he makes, but his family is hungry. What is your solution for the evil business owner?

I can arrange to have those widgets made for $6 each, including the shipping from Bangalore.

Bob can get a job somewhere else.

Yeah, cuz everyone is hiring right now, right?

Bob had a job making $10 a widget: more than 95% of all people make. He was dissatisfied. His employer was dissatisfied. So the job was sent overseas.

Bob will work it out, or else his genes won't cloud our lovely pool.

Struggle against the logic all you like, but you will either adapt to it or starve.

But yeah, go blame the employer. Unionize. Strike. Who knows? Maybe that company won't relocate and leave 20,000 people fighting for 4 MacDonald's jobs.

If they relocate who is going to buy all the products they are making? American citizens continue to represent the largest purchasers of consumer goods on the planet. In any case you can only exploit less developed nations for so long, until you develop their economies to the point where you are right back to the same labor and regulatory costs you face in a developed nation like the US.

In the long run we are going to have to figure out how to more tightly manage our economy. There are a lot of distruptive technologies on the horizon and robots don't buy cars or clothes, there will be the effects of global warming on food production, and of course are ever expanding population. There are major societal changes on the horizon, both at home and abroad. The world is going to be a very different place in 50 years time.

Yup.

Companies, since the globalization kicked into high gear in Clinton's last term, are extremely short-sighted. They only forecast 2-3 years out, with a focus on maximizing profits and meeting stock price targets.

That is one major cause of the income disparity that you see today.

Nothing can be done about it, so I recommend buying a crappy farm, far away from all the soon-to-be-angry city folks. Brew some beer. Raise bacon.

Abacus9:Giblet: Abacus9: Giblet: Silly Jesus: I own a company, and I sell widgets. I get $11 for each widget that I sell. I pay Bob $10 for each widget that he makes, but his family is hungry. What is your solution for the evil business owner?

I can arrange to have those widgets made for $6 each, including the shipping from Bangalore.

Bob can get a job somewhere else.

Yeah, cuz everyone is hiring right now, right?

Bob had a job making $10 a widget: more than 95% of all people make. He was dissatisfied. His employer was dissatisfied. So the job was sent overseas.

Bob will work it out, or else his genes won't cloud our lovely pool.

Struggle against the logic all you like, but you will either adapt to it or starve.

Too bad the same rules don't apply to the employer.

Yeah, but you only vote for those politicians that the employers choose (as advertised on MSNBC and Faux).

Giblet:Abacus9: Giblet: Abacus9: Giblet: Silly Jesus: I own a company, and I sell widgets. I get $11 for each widget that I sell. I pay Bob $10 for each widget that he makes, but his family is hungry. What is your solution for the evil business owner?

I can arrange to have those widgets made for $6 each, including the shipping from Bangalore.

Bob can get a job somewhere else.

Yeah, cuz everyone is hiring right now, right?

Bob had a job making $10 a widget: more than 95% of all people make. He was dissatisfied. His employer was dissatisfied. So the job was sent overseas.

Bob will work it out, or else his genes won't cloud our lovely pool.

Struggle against the logic all you like, but you will either adapt to it or starve.

Too bad the same rules don't apply to the employer.

Yeah, but you only vote for those politicians that the employers choose (as advertised on MSNBC and Faux).